Happy #phonologicalfriday everyone!
This week’s activity is designed to help students with the highest level of phonological awareness, phonemic awareness.
Before we get into this week’s activity using Elkonin or Sound boxes, we should review some terminology.
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in the English language. The number of phonemes in the English language varies between 41 – 44, depending on the source you reference and what English dialect you speak.
Phonemic Awareness is the ability for an individual to manipulate the individual sounds in a word.
Did you know that children have a highly developed unconscious knowledge of phonemes before they begin to read? (Adams, 1991)
Today’s activity works on bringing this working knowledge of phonemes into conscious knowledge for these students.
We do this by having students use manipulative such as bingo chips, gems or blocks to represent the different phonemes (sounds) in a word.
Student should be introduced to this activity in small groups or one-on-one for those who might struggle with this activity.
For this lesson, you will need Elkonin Boxes and manipulatives such as gems, chips or blocks.
When introducing this activity, tell the students they are going to learn how to divide a word up into its individual sounds. They are going to move one manipulative into a box for each sound that they hear.
Start of by just counting the phonemes orally without showing them the Elkonin box. Begin by saying the word normally and then say it slowly. After you say it slowly, ask the student(s) if they can help you count the number of individual sounds in the word.
Tell them that you are going to show them how to do this activity with cards and blocks (or whatever manipulative you plan on using).
Place one card on the desk and pronounce the word normally once and then say it again pronouncing the individual phonemes. Tell the student(s) next time you say the word, you are going to move a block up into the square for each of the sounds in the word.
For the word ‘cat’ you would move a block up for each of the phonemes /k/-/a/-/t/.
After the initial demonstration, ask the students to join the activity by saying the next word for the picture and stretching the word into the different sounds while you move the blocks up to a box for each sound.
Now give the students their own card so they can follow along with you as you model the activity.
Gradually release the responsibility to the student so that you no longer have to model the activity with the student. Soon the students will be able to pronounce the word on their own while placing the blocks into the boxes themselves.
As the students get better at this task, you can start using harder single syllable words that contain more phonemes including blends and diagraphs.
When using words with blends and digraphs, make sure you are aware of the difference between the two and discus how sometimes, one sound is represented by more than one letter.
The word stop would be segmented into four sounds /s/-/t/-/o/-/p/ but the word dish would be segmented into three sounds /d/-/i/-/sh/.
In some programs, they use different colored blocks to represent the different sounds. The consonant sound(s) before the vowel are considered to be the onset of the syllable and are represented by a green block.
The vowel sound which is referred to as the rime, is represented by a yellow block. The final consonant sound(s) referred to as the coda, is represented by a red block.
As students learn about phoneme/grapheme or sound/symbol correspondence, they can start telling you what letters they think would represent the different blocks.
Be sure to check out more details about Phonemes on our Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter pages.
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